


Balance of Power: Intermission

by Grendel



Series: Thronestuck [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-17
Updated: 2013-01-17
Packaged: 2017-11-25 20:59:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/642898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grendel/pseuds/Grendel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After being separated from Equius, Aradia is trapped in the clutches of Lord Scratch. But all is far from lost. In fact, she has her ways to get around his magics... and she has big plans for how to get out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Balance of Power: Intermission

**Author's Note:**

> Intermission! Yay.
> 
> Part III is still in progress, but going very well. I have it outlined and mostly written, just need to fill in some blanks. In the meantime, let's check in...
> 
> -Grendel

“Fetch me that glass, won’t you, my dear?”  
It was not a question. The format was mere formality, a polite frosting on a teacake that concealed a knife. It was an order, plain and simple, and the two parties involved knew it.  
The first party was a man, looking fairly aged but not yet old, sitting calmly in a well-stuffed chair behind a massive hardwood desk.  
He was pale as bone, with a round face set with fine lines at the corners of the eyes and mouth. Colorless hair that seemed white only for lack of better options adorned the top of his head, close cropped about the ears and smoothed back from the forehead. He was not a large man, but he had a presence that took over the room. It was impossible to ignore him.

Though damned if that wasn’t exactly what the second party in attendance was trying to do.  
A creature made of curves was curled in on herself in the window seat. Where the man was bone, she was flesh. A soft layer of femininity covered walls of hard, developed muscle, concealing well just how badly she could hurt a person if she tried. She was slight, even shorter than the pale man, and her fey little face was quite overwhelmed by a forest of lush, thick, wild black hair. It looked like she’d been neglecting to brush it, preferring to let the curls grow wild, or else she had some bed-hair for some reason.  
She was by no means the most beautiful woman in the world. She had the odd half-way look of one who had been terribly underfed and overworked, and then suddenly overfed and underworked (at least in a physical sense). And she seemed slightly uncomfortable in a body that suddenly had the curves a limited diet had denied it. Her flesh was a bit pale, but it had been burned and tanned for all her life, so the paleness was born of being suddenly confined indoors and under a sky that seemed to default to overcast. Poor breeding showed in her peasant's face, and her hands (though now beginning to soften) were callused from years of outdoor use. Yet, beneath it all, she had a spark to her, something in the bone that made her preternaturally attractive, at least to those quick enough to catch it.  
Dark red-brown eyes, colder now than they had been a year and a half ago, focused out the window, refusing to acknowledge that the man had spoken at all. But, of course, he wasn’t going to allow that now was he?

“Tch,” he clicked his tongue like a disapproving grandfather, “That won’t do, Lady Megido,” he said. “Such disrespect. I would have thought you would have learned by now. _Come here_.” A skeleton-like hand extended from the long, draping sleeve of the man’s robes and beckoned in a lazy, effortless way, fingers curling and urging the girl forth.  
Very suddenly the woman rose, drawn to her feet as if on a string. A look of surprise briefly flashed across her face, quickly replaced by a scowl. Her plain green shift dress fluttered about her ankles as her feet were forced to move, step after step. Her heels dug in when she got the chance, and she even tried in vain to grab a supporting pillar in the black marble room in an effort to slow her progress.  
“Feeling petulant today I see,” the man went on as the girl was forced to present herself and stand at attention on the other side of his desk. She glared at him, those big eyes narrowed, hard and sharp as flint. “Really now, Lady Megido, obedience is a virtue. One I’m sure your lord-love would appreciate.”

The color rose in the young woman’s face, maroon over her tanned cheeks and nose. “Don’t talk about him,” she said, voice soft but tone firm.   
“Don’t?” the pale man echoed, raising a colorless eyebrow at her. “There are many things I have told you _don’t_ do. And yet you’ve had a remarkable tendency to go off and do them anyway.” He looked at her for a moment before returning to the stiff yellow parchment before him, curling with a thick layer of wax. “I think that I’m safely within my rights to speak of whomever I please.”  
There was quiet then, only the nib of his pen scritch-scratching and the bottled anger of her breath coming in heavy nasal bursts.   
“Now, as I was saying,” the man went on when he found a good place to pause, “Fetch me that glass.”

When the dark-haired woman did not move right away, the pale man sighed and brought up the hand again, pointing his index finger at the tall glass of water sitting on a side table a few feet away.  
Once again compelled like a puppet on a string, the woman fetched the water. This time she did not struggle against it, but went along huffily, like a child on the verge of a temper tantrum.  
Clearly the gestures and words had a power over her. Direct orders had become a problem for this woman in the past year of her life. From Scratch, she was quite unable to resist them, in spite of all her best efforts.  
This had come in the wake of her refusal to respond to threats of physical violence, even those that had been fully carried out. It had been decided that the most effective way to make her behave was to _make her behave_.

When she had the drink retrieved, she slammed it on the table before the man. It splashed a bit and he sighed in a long-suffering sort of way. “Clean it up, Aradia, and don’t make me ask twice.”  
She glared for only a moment before setting to it, not looking at the man as she fetched a cloth and mopped up the water before it could stain the wood or seep into the parchment.  
As she cleaned, the man regarded her calmly. “I seem more your nursemaid than anything else at the moment, Lady Megido. A bad day, I presume?”

“You could say that,” she replied bitterly, bunching up the rag and going to sit down in the window seat again. The sky outside was overcast, a cold slate gray that whipped and bit through cloaks. It was late in the Autumn, this fortress was well north, and snow couldn’t be far.  
The indirect light filtered in and backlit Aradia with a subtle haze. If the sun were to peek out, her pitch hair would have been set aflame around the edges. But as it was, she seemed muted.   
“You’re growing anxious,” Scratch said to her, turning back to his writing (some report bound for his elusive master, most likely). “You needn’t fret. Soon enough, you and I shall be the capital, and soon enough my Felt will follow us. And then the way will be prepared for Lord English’s arrival.” The idea seemed to please him (or at least Aradia thought it might, it was difficult to tell with Scratch), and a small smile flickered over his thin lips.

But this was not why Aradia was anxious, and while they both knew it, only Scratch was rude enough to comment on it.  
“And sooner still, you’ll have your chance to find that lordling over whom you refuse to cease pining,” he said, seemingly amused by the whole affair. “Do you think he’s still holding out so staunchly for you? I doubt it, Lady Megido. By now he’s likely wedded and bedded some noblewoman, if you’ll forgive the vulgarity of the term. A valuable daughter of a valuable house. A good match.”

Aradia wouldn’t look at him, but folded her arms over her chest.  
He was waiting for her. Equius wouldn’t abandon her. She knew him to be better than that. He was still there, a bachelor in spite of all expectations, holding out for the peasant girl who’d exchanged her life for his.  
Because he loved her. And that was more than enough to - 

“Do you think he has children by now, Lady Megido?”  
She shot Scratch the most venomous look she could muster. That was uncalled for.  
“That bristles you too much, Lady Megido,” he continued, “I’ve taught you better than that. You’re to be a statue at all times, if you’ll recall. Furthermore, it was more than a year ago and your condition scarcely lasted a five-month. Be less sensitive, Aradia.” The terms he used were so clinical, so dismissive. The woman’s temper flared.  
If it weren’t for the bonds of words that locked like manacles around her wrists, Aradia would have struck Scratch. He has no right to make light of her loss.

For five months after she’d been parted from Equius, for five short, sweet months, she’d thought that she would have his child. Aradia thought that even though she’d lost her love for a time, she could surprise and delight him with his progeny upon their reunion.  
She’d come to hate herself for the silly fantasies she’d indulged at the time. Thoughts of a little one with curly dark hair and big blue eyes. Thoughts of how she’d never really wanted to be a mother before, of how she’d only expected to one day produce children as a duty and an obligation, but was quickly warming to the idea of raising someone part her and part Equius. Thoughts of the look on Equius’s face when they were together again, when he saw the baby for the first time and realized. Thoughts of them being happy together. 

Before she’d realized the rigors of the training Scratch would put her through. Before she’d learned how magic worked: draining the lifeforce from the mage, like creeping frostbite, starting with those parts deemed least necessary. Before she’d understood the implications of the things she had to do now. Before she understood that, even had the magic not done its awful work, Scratch never would have permitted her to keep the baby anyway.  
She’d just been beginning to show, dresses growing tight around her swelling belly, when she’d lost the child.

The fear she’d initially felt for Scratch turned to hate once she realized that, had he taught her to draw from his Lord’s vast wells of energies right away instead of waiting, she might have been able to carry the infant to term.  
That’s when she had begun ‘acting out’, as Scratch termed it, necessitating the additional oaths and bonds that held her now.

Aradia was a mage, and a powerful one after more than a year of single-minded dedication and intense training. She could write and speak with eloquence. She could perform mathematical functions so high that they, too, sometimes seemed like magic. She understood politics and philosophy as well as any classically trained lord’s heir. All this. And she was helpless to disobey even a command to fetch a glass of water.  
It was demeaning, and she knew that Equius would never have put up with such a thing, were it happening to him. He would have figured something out, he would have killed Scratch and his guards... maybe even his whole army, the green-mailed Felt. He would have done something heroic and bold and too brash but exactly what was needed. He would have-

“Do your drills, Lady Megido,” Scratch interrupted Aradia’s increasingly outlandish thoughts.   
She turned her head to look at him, “Which ones?”  
“I think we shall start with recitation. And then you may begin a few simple spells.” He wasn’t looking at her. This was only to keep her busy while he finished up whatever he was writing.  
As she sat there, Aradia slowly and deliberately went through lists of information she’d memorized.

Their plans: “Prepare the entranceway for Lord English. Be rid of the Empress.”  
“That’s where you come in, Lady Megido.”  
How these plans would be executed: “Go to the capital by the Empress’s invitation. Ingratiate ourselves with her court. Cast her out. Be rid of all opposition to Lord English.”  
What parties would be involved: “House Pyrope, lawkeepers and dragon-knights. Head, Lady Pyrope the Red Glare. House Serket, assassins and spycraft. Head, Marquise Spinneret, the Mind Fang. House Zahhak, horselords and cavalry. Head...”  
“Go on, Lady Megido.”  
“...I’m uncertain who is in charge.”  
“We shall rectify that later. Continue.”  
“House Ampora, naval units and economic providers. Head the Orphaner Dualscar. And...” Aradia inhaled a deep breath, “House Piexes, the ruling house. Head, Empress Meenah, Her Imperious Condescension.”

She spoke not every thing she knew, but every thing that Scratch knew she knew. The touches of gossip and the hints of rumor that she’d caught from the Felt were kept to herself.  
When she was finished, Scratch had her recite the complex, old-language words of spells, from the basic to the complex. The words were another formality (there were very many of those in this world Aradia had been tossed into so abruptly), a mere lens through which to focus energy. What really counted was the energy itself.  
Usually it came from within the Mage, as magic was an externalization of lifeforce. But the mysterious Lord English had some sort of reserve of power into which all of Scratch’s warriors could tap. Including, now, Aradia. No more fingers that blackened on the ends like frostbite, and no more alarming jolts where her heart skipped a beat when she’d performed a spell. 

Still, Scratch told her that she did not have a talent for magic. Yes she was gifted with it, and yes she could do it, but it took hard work. There was not an ease to it. Aradia interpreted the quirk of his mouth at such things to be disappointment. Apparently she reminded him of a previous servant of his, someone who was much more advanced in such areas.  
But all the same, Aradia had learned quickly enough, and was now adept. Even if she did have to murmur the spellwork beneath her breath to force the energy to sharpness.

“You’ll never be a true Mage,” Scratch interrupted her suddenly. Aradia paused and looked at him. “You lack the viciousness. It’s a pity, really. Your job will not be to make things happen. Your job will be to clean up after the things that other people cause. But you will simply have to suffice, little Maid.” The man could not be more condescending if he tried.  
Actually, no, he probably could. It was always when Aradia thought it couldn’t get any worse that it did.  
“That will do for now, Lady Megido,” said Scratch, rolling up his parchment and melting a stick of sealing wax over the smokey flame of a candle. “I dismiss you back to your chambers. No adventuring today, though,” he added after a moment of consideration for his trainee’s usual habits, “Our tour will commence in a scarce matter of months, and I mean to test you well before then. I mean for you to be at your best.”  
He didn’t need to tell her twice. Aradia stood, curtsied (he’d make her go back and do it again if she didn’t, like a bratty little girl, until she got it ‘right’), and hurried from the room.

The long halls of green and black marble stretched and wound endlessly. The fortress didn’t seem so large from the outside, just a building cut into the walls of a cliff... but the maze of corridors and rooms and landings and stairs made it feel vast. She’d often gotten lost in the beginning, but now she knew every passage, and finding her way back to her quarters was simple.  
Inside, she shut the door behind her and switched the lock (another formality - if Scratch wanted to see her, he’d just find one of his many methods to place her outside the supposed sanctuary - but it made her feel better).  
Now that her audience with Scratch was complete, Aradia had the chance to return to her other tasks, tasks she herself had set. There was a reason for her anxiousness, a reason even Scratch didn’t know.

“I’m back,” she said breathlessly, dress whirling around her ankles as she pressed against the now-shut door.  
“I was beginning to worry,” came the chuckled response, low and gentle as a large figure stepped into view. Equius Zahhak, head of House Zahhak and Lord of the Void-lands, patron and protector of several thousand of the Empire’s citizens, victor of the Signless War, stood in the corner of the room.   
“Never worry,” Aradia said, smiling. “I have everything under control.”


End file.
